Amdahl Corp, and 44% shareholder Fujitsu Ltd are considering consolidating all their mainframe manufacturing at Fujitsu in Japan after 1996, which would mean closure of Amdahl’s plants in Sunnyvale and Ireland, the San Jose Mercury News reports. With the mainframe market in terminal, if slow, decline, the move would make a lot of sense, and the most striking aspect of it is that it confirms that Amdahl is developing a new generation of monolithic mainframes, whereas it is understood that IBM Corp currently intends to confine itself to further kickers for the present generation of ES/9000s while new development is concentrated on the embryonic parallel machines, while noises out of Hitachi Ltd suggest that it plans to follow the IBM parallel path. If that is so, Amdahl would be the only company with a new generation of monolithic machines after 1996, and these are likely to appeal to a substantial number of users leery about entrusting their business to the emerging parallel generation.
